Good bread, bad bread

I had a serious bread fail today. My bag of spelt flour was inexplicably filled with rye (I should have guessed from its distinctive gray color), a flour with entirely different baking properties that turned the rosemary polenta dough into a sticky mess that in turn baked into unattractive discus-shaped loaves. They taste just fine, but damn, they're ugly. Just as every beautiful batch of bread lifts my day as I unload it from the oven, every failure drops me with disappointment. I wonder sometimes if I'm too emotionally entangled with my bread, but having so much personally invested in the work is an excellent motivator, so for now I'll let myself and self-worth rise and fall with the dough.

The rest of the bake, fortunately, went smoothly, including the new and totally seasonally inappropriate market special. Crabby oats! Despite its grumbling-white-bearded-farmer of a name, it's actually lovely, scented with spiced crab apple butter and toothy with (lactofermented!) steel-cut oats. I felt slightly sacrilegious making such an autumn-inspired bread in the blazing heat of summer, but you can eat it in the cool morning. With a generous smear of butter.
More summery is this week's tart: fresh blackberry with a lavendar Earl Grey pastry cream. I don't have any pictures because I'm picking the berries on my way to market tomorrow, but I promise they'll be pretty, as well as delicious.

Come by the market to taste my experiments and to jeer at my sad rye-rosemary.
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Until tomorrow,